Basic Attention Token for a Brave, New Internet

The project, aptly named Brave, is about to establish an innovative micropayment marketplace among Advertisers, Publishers and Consumers.

Content creators and distributors are constantly coming up with new ways to serve content that keep audiences engaged but the monetization process is still very primitive. The founding father of Javascript, Brendan Eich, is now developing a new system with Mozilla to revolutionize the online advertising industry. The project, aptly named Brave, is about to establish an innovative micropayment marketplace among Advertisers, Publishers and Consumers. SELISE Digital decided to take a closer look at what Brave and BAT are all about.

How does it work?

The BAT system will essentially facilitate payments between the triad of Advertisers, Publishers and Consumers. Advertisers pay their target audience directly for seeing their advertisements. The target audience, in turn, pays Publishers for consuming engaging content. Payments are automatically transferred from a user’s browser to Brave publishers. In order to keep a healthy balance, you can either watch advertisements or convert actual currency to fund your browser’s embedded wallet with Basic Attention Tokens (BAT).

The Brave browser is already supported on Desktop and mobile operating systems. It already includes a beta version of the BAT payment system with a unique wallet on the Windows, Mac and Linux versions. You can already donate a monthly payment (in BAT) to your favourite sites which in turn can claim their revenue by becoming a part of the Brave publisher community!

Why should we care?

Becoming a content creator becomes a better deal with Brave. The aim is simplifying monetization of great content through fees or donations. Hidden charges and complicated authentication processes will become a thing of the past. As a user, you can directly pay through your browser settings which allows news sites and public wikis to provide an entirely new experience to their users. This paves the way for them to expand their content production capacity since funding will no longer be an issue – even for long tail content producers.

Life will become easier for content consumers too. You can either watch more meaningful ads or simply opt-out of the ad space altogether by converting any currency into BAT and enjoy your favourite content against a granular fee. This is particularly handy for consumers in restrictive countries who do not have access to popular payment gateways like Paypal. BAT is already available on renowned platforms like Uphold and tradeable on various cryptocurrency exchanges. Furthermore Brave makes bloated ad blockers obsolete.

Advertisers will get a better return on their investment with their advertising efforts reaching users, whose attention towards their ads is actually measurable through so called Basic Attention Metrics (BAM) that sit right in a user’s browser. The introduction of Basic Attention Tokens and its associated system could mean a higher click-through and video retention rate along with lower bounce rates in campaign microsites. So called fake clicks from bots and click-farms to make sponsored content look more authentic will disappear from the scene.

What is the final verdict?

The Brave project could be the beginning of a truly free marketplace inside the World Wide Web. It provides more incentives to content creators with the possibility of earning more revenue while it promises advertisers the opportunity to create better targeted, high-value campaigns. Consumers finally get to have their say within this whole process by having the option to participate and contribute. While it is barely out of the conceptual phase right now, the BAT token has a market capitalization of over 150mn USD and is already listed on the major Cryptocurrency exchanges.

SELISE Digital believes that the BAT system holds the potential to completely revolutionize the way content creators, consumers and advertisers interact within the digital ecosystem. Partnerships between Brave and large content and advertising players such as Apple, Amazon or YouTube could change the digital advertising industry overnight. Basic Attention Tokens could be the start of a brave, new Internet!